In the wireless communication industry, there is rising competition among various network operators to increase their roaming revenues. To enhance roaming revenues, the network operators commonly offer various “Value Added Services” (VASs) to their roamers in order to provide a better, easier telephone mobile communications experience to visitors or travelers, to encourage increased mobile phone use, and to spread the use of roaming to more users.
Some of these VASs can be provided to inbound roamers (who are subscribers of a home network and roaming in a visited network) using enhanced applications, such as, but not limited to, providing the inbound roamers with a visited network Mobile Station International Subscriber Directory Number (MSISDN) to make calls at local rates in the visited network, allowing the inbound roamers having a dual International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) in the visited network to make calls at local rates, removing a call barring parameter to enable inbound roamers' mobile communication, and restoring mobile communication of the inbound roamer when his handset gets stuck in the visited network.
In order to provide these VASs to the inbound roamers, the visited network operators need a central location (or a central node) to deploy and operate these enhanced applications, while complying with international standards set forth by Global System for Mobile communication Association (GSMA) for inter-operator communication. Many visited network operators add new signaling node(s) or configure their existing signaling nodes in their networks. In an exemplary case, the visited network operator may deploy a Gateway Location Register (GLR) as a signaling node to optimize the registration process (i.e. Location Update (LUP) process). This prior art GLR is positioned between the visited network's Visited Location Register (VLR)/Serving General Packet Radio System Support Node (SGSN) and the home network's Home Location Register (HLR).
The prior art GLR is only able to cache subscriber profile information of its inbound roamers during their first LUP attempt at the visited network's VLR. Using the cached profile information, the prior art GLR responds to subsequent LUP attempts by these inbound roamers at the visited network's VLR by acting as a pseudo-HLR to these inbound roamers.
Since inbound roamers' LUP process is handled within the visited network, GLR's originally were proposed to reduce the inter-network signalling overhead caused due to the LUP process. However the cost associated with signaling has reduced significantly, thereby making the prior art GLR deployment of reduced benefit to these visited network operators. Moreover, even state-of-the-art GLRs do not assist the visited network operator in providing any VASs to inbound roamers, and is limited just to caching of subscriber profile information during LUP process.
Specifically, typical GLRs in the art us a single Global Title (GT) of the visited network while communicating with various elements in the home network. The GT is a unique address that is used to differentiate network elements within a network topology. A prior art GLR's GT typically presents an address of a VLR in the visited network when interacting with an HLR in the home network, and an address of an HLR in the home network when interacting with a VLR in the visited network. In this single GT approach, the GLR always uses the same GT to interact with all VLRs in the visited network and all HLRs in the home network. Since the prior art GLR represents all VLRs by the single GT while interacting with network elements in the home network, the prior art GLR is unable to emulate individual network elements in the visited network. This does not support a visited network operator in its purpose of providing VASs to its inbound roamers.
Moreover, due to this single GT, a home network application is unable to cache correct capabilities of the visited network's VLR. Furthermore, due to the use of single GT, the prior art GLR is unable to provide redundancy in case the GLR fails. This is because a signaling node in the visited network (such as a Signaling Transfer Point (STP)) is unable to route Signaling Connection Control Part (SCCP) messages of inbound roamers, originating from the home network and destined for a particular VLR in the visited network, to the destined VLR since there is no possibility of maintaining a routing at the STP corresponding to each VLR in the visited network, independently. This eventually disrupts signaling whenever the GLR goes down, resulting in loss of roaming revenue for the visited network operator.
In accordance with the foregoing, there is a need in the art of a system, a method, and a computer program product, which provides a visited network operator with a GLR (or enhances the functionality of its existing GLR) that enables the visited network operator to provide various network based VASs (using the application logic) at a centralized location in the network, in addition to handling the GLR failure scenario.